45 hours following its public debut, iOS 7.1 users are now generating a full 12% of total North American iOS Web traffic. With a 6.1 percentage point increase, this is roughly a doubling of the usage share observed within the earlier 24-hour study published on March 11, 2014.

UPDATE (3/12/14): 45 hours following its public debut, iOS 7.1 users are now generating a full 12% of total North American iOS Web traffic. With a 6.1 percentage point increase, this is roughly a doubling of the usage share observed within the earlier 24-hour study published on March 11, 2014. This share growth is largely on par with that of iOS 7.0.6, which hit 13.3% 48 hours after its release.

ORIGINAL POST (3/11/14): iOS 7.1 was publicly released during the early afternoon of March 10, 2014. The minor version update fixed a reboot bug for some iPhone users, improved fingerprint sensing on the iPhone 5S and added functionality for the just-announced CarPlay feature. As with most minor version updates, iOS 7.1 adoption rates have been less dramatic than those of its major-version counterparts. In the 24 hours following the operating system’s public release, iOS 7.1 users generated 5.9% of total North American iOS Web traffic.

To quantify this study, Chitika Insights examined tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian iOS-based online ad impressions generated within the Chitika Ad Network from March 9 through March 11, 2014.

At 5.9%, North American iOS 7.1 adoption has progressed at a very similar rate to iOS 7.0.6. 24 hours following that release, iOS 7.0.6 users generated 6% of total iOS traffic, averaging to about 5% over the course of the full day. Considering Apple’s update notification strategy, along with these two data points, it seems likely that future minor iOS 7 version updates will experience highly comparable levels of adoption.

Looking more broadly, iOS 7 users overall generated more than 80% iOS Web traffic on average over the three-day timespan of this study. This likely represents a peak, as it has remained largely unchanged since our previous study (81% on February 25). With this in mind, all eyes will be on iOS 8 and whether it can continue Apple’s streak of higher rates of adoption for each successive major release.